Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, A.D. 1000–1800 c9.30

c9.30

But a little reflection would help realise that in spite of the notices of Al Idrisi, Indian population did show a decline during this period. Idrisi mostly talks of port-towns and cities in Sind. This Sind was under Muslim rule. Khwaja Masud bin Sad bin Salman, a poet contemporary of Sultan Ibrahim Ghaznavi, also loved his Lahore, now a Muslim city in the Ghaznavid empire. These Muslim writers were right in their own way of thinking and feeling. The population of Punjab and Sind impressed them; in its important towns there were now many Muslim inhabitants, and they felt jubilant at the extension of Islam into India. They, naturally, did not care to note that immigration of a few Muslims from abroad would have been neutralized by the emigration of Indians to South-East Asia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that conversions to Islam did not mean addition to population, and that both Punjab and Sind had larger number of inhabitants in pre-Mahmud days.